CFTC Chairman Massad Announces Open Meeting on Three End-User Issues

This afternoon, CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad announced a public meeting of the CFTC to take place on November 3, 2014 at 10:30 am (Eastern). The meeting will address the “further fine-tuning of [the CFTC] rules” with respect to commercial end-users. The meeting is scheduled to consider:

clarification to the rules regarding when forward contracts with volumetric optionality should be classified as “swaps”;

whether the CFTC should codify in a rule prior no-action relief with respect to the CFTC Rule 1.35 recordkeeping obligations (see our prior coverage here and some of the letters here and here); and

whether the CFTC should require CFTC action before moving the deadline for FCMs to post “residual interest” to any earlier than 6:00 pm on the next business day after the trade date (this ultimately affects when end-users must post margin with an FCM).

The Press Release regarding the meeting can be found here. Chairman Massad’s statement regarding the meeting can be found here.

This meeting marks the latest event in a new trend at the CFTC: the “tweaking” of CFTC rules to address end-user concerns. Earlier instances include:

the approval of an amendment to Dodd-Frank Act rules for government-owned electric and natural gas utilities (see our prior post here); and

no-action relief (for some funds) from the general solicitation restrictions in CFTC Rule 4.7 and CFTC Rule 4.13(a)(3) to harmonize the CFTC rules with the SEC rule changes arising from the JOBS Act (see our prior post here).

Stay tuned to see if this trend of “tweaking” continues. The Swap Report